Two weeks ago, I traveled to Pushkar for the annual Camel Fair. For 8 days, I was armed with only my X-pro 1 , the 18mm f/2, and the 35mm f/1.4. This was my first experience working extensively with the X-pro 1. It felt different. Last year I walked the grounds of the Pushkar Camel fair armed with a Canon 1D Mark II with a 70-200 2.8 IS and a Canon 5D with a 16-35 II f/2.8. A 35mm 1.4 and a 50mm 1.4 were stowed my backpack. I came away with images I really liked, but also came away each night with a sore neck and back and an ever growing frustration of hauling so much stuff. For one day I decided to carry just my 1d Mark II with the 35mm 1.4 to "free myself." It saved my back but not quite my neck and I still felt like this big camera was all people looked at when I first approached them to have a chat, ask questions, etc. I needed something less obtrusive. Along came the X-pro 1 that I purchased a few months ago. The Pushkar Camel Fair was the first event I felt I could give it a good working test and compare its performance and image quality with the performance and images I shot last year with my Canon gear. I also wanted to see how it held up in the sandy elements of the desert. I am very pleased with the results. The image quality, I feel, with the X-Pro 1 and 35mm f/1.4 combo is as good as the image quality of my Canon 1D Mark II and 35mm 1.4 combo. I love this. Performance wise, the auto focus SPEED with the X-pro I doesn't even compare. It is slow in the world of pro SLR's but then again, for travel, I am usually not shooting anything that is moving fast, so speed is not an issue. It is not too slow to frustrate me in any way...especially since the firmware update a couple months ago. I have found that shooting in manual AF mode and using the AEL button for auto focus is a bit faster and easier. The auto focus ACCURACY with the X-Pro 1 is great. Once it locks on, it's good to go. I took 2-3 extra shots in certain situations early on in the camel fair just to make sure I got one in focus as I was a bit skeptical. All the images came out tack sharp. Very nice! ....

Conclusion:Will I be buying this camera? No, but I do have a the newer FujiFilm X-E1 with the 18-55 f2.8/f4 zoom lens on order. This camera has exactly the same sensor as the X-1Pro and is even a bit smaller and lighter, due to the lack of the Optical viewfinder (OVF). By the way, on the X-1Pro, I did hardly use the OVF and really like how the Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) works. Will it replace my full frame Nikon D800? No of course not. For the moment there is clearly room for both. The X-E1 will go on my travels whenever I need to go light. I do however believe that the D800 might be the last DSLR body I bought. The future of the mirror-less is surely exciting and I sincerely believe they will eventually replace most if not all DSLR bodies.

The XPro-1 has not failed to amaze me every time I pick up the camera. From unbelievable low light capability to those gorgeous Fuji colors straight out of the camera, I simply couldn’t recommend any other small camera system till date. So when Fuji generously gave me the 60mm Macro to test, I prepared myself to get wowed once more.. Full disclosure, Fujifilm isn’t paying me a dime (or fils) to put these words down about their products. I’ve paid the (ridiculously high in this region) price out of my own pocket. Even after my beloved X100 was stolen. Thats testament to one fact. I’m a believer in Fuji and love a great comeback. Its true that Fujifilm Middle East has featured me a couple of times on their social media but thats been with no strings attached. So with that out of the way, I’m going to give you my two cents on the only XF lens I didn’t buy along with my camera during its initial launch. Why you ask ? Why didn’t I just complete the set and get all three ?

....

Absolutely…. I’m going to get this lens. The optical quality to me is stunning. It makes my small bag of the body plus three lenses a complete work-horse kit for when I shoot cars, the streets or absolutely anything else. My D800 only comes out once in a while these days and I’m pretty sure this is going to be great for portraiture as well – (awaiting my next willing subject to explore that genre). Fuji have made sure they keep the trend of improving their existing products with each successive firmware update and I’m yet to see them neglect any of the bugs reported either directly or through any from of media. If you’re considering the X-Series and want to get in close, make sure that this is on your shopping list. I know its on mine.

Summary: Alice Annanack Baron, three months after the polar bear attack (http://waseyaimages.net/2012/07/a-bad-bear/), greets me on the porch of her house. She is finally back home after many surgeries to her hand and scalp. The bear scalped her and his teeth and claws were just a few centimeters of her temporal artery. She still have nightmares and she is afraid of darkness. Will she ever go back on the land ? She has doubt. Her husband, Tommy, her hero, goes through tough times. Only a month after the attack, he lost a brother to the river, on a hunting trip. As both of them accompany me the door, Alice adds:“Winter is finally here, she says, like to make sure the summer of her meeting with nanook is something of the past.

About Marc-André Pauzé:As a health professional and award-winner photographer-documentarist-writer, Marc-André Pauzé has a mission, being a storyteller of the human condition and to bear witness to the eternal struggle for human rights and social justice by combining documentary work with respect to the human dignity of his subjects.

...let me start with the Fuji X-E1. Fuji got me this camera and the 18-55 f2.8-f4 zoom just a few days before we left for New York, so this is really my very first experience with this camera. I saw the camera at Photokina and was immediately very anxious to test this one out, the reason ? very simple, it’s actually almost a X-Pro1 but for less money…. and yes it does miss some features and it’s a bit smaller, but it has a build in flash (which I call the “Wall-E” strobe because it looks a lot like Wall-E) and it keeps the same image quality from the X-Pro1, which you probably already know is awesome. The moment I got the X-pro1 I was in love with the camera, for street photography and any photography where you don’t want to be noticed it’s a great “stealth camera”, I always call it my “wolf in sheep clothes”. There was one thing I really wished for in the system and that was a zoom lens… well Fuji got one (actually more now), for this trip I got the 18-55 with me which is a great walk around lens and gives you a very nice reach. The lens is relatively light stark starting at f2.8 and ending on f4 at the long end. I know that some people will start with “why not a constant f2.8?” but do remember that if you want that the lens would be a lot heavier and bigger and for most situations the f2.8-f4.0 coupled with the great noise performance in the X-E1 and X-pro1 actually work perfectly. Now one of the really nice things about the 18-55 is the fact that’s is also a lens with stabilization, and I can report that it works really well. I don’t know how many stops it will really do, but trust me when I say…. “it works really well”. So how do I like the Fuji X-E1. Well you know from me that I’m always doing reviews from a standpoint of using the camera and not the pixelpeeping and 1:1 comparisons (there are many sites for that) so here is my personal opinion. I love the build in strobe, when shooting the camera for private use the build in strobe is great when you take for example a shot in a restaurant where you want your group to stand out and lower the ambient, it’s also great as fill in flash outside and… well where you normally also use an on camera strobe for. Also the speed of the camera is great, the viewfinder is very nice, it responds very quickly and it’s sharp enough to judge images. Working with the X-E1 on location is great, focus locks on VERY quickly, this was also a huge difference on the X-Pro1 after the 2.0 upgrade by the way. The image quality is just jaw dropping, the image quality of the X-E1 is without any doubt just as good as the X-Pro1. The only thing you have to note is that when importing the files into Lightroom all images come in cropped to 16:9 mode, so when you import make sure you make a new crop to 100% and sync that to all images.....

As you will see from the Kage Collective website, we are a group of international photographers shooting documentary projects about a wide variety of subjects. The one common thread that runs through the project and the thing that not only brought us together, but also binds us, is that we shoot with the Fujifilm X series cameras. At the moment the X100, X-Pro1 and X-E1 are the models being used by the collective, but I’m sure other models will become available to us, and of course we can’t wait to get our hands on the new XF lenses as they come available. Kage Collective has been simmering away in the background for a few months, taking shape and getting refined ready for todays launch. It’s been difficult not to let it slip a few times, especially on Twitter. I’m excited and thrilled to be a part of this collective and couldn’t wish for a better group of photographers to collaborate with. To say we’re on the same wavelength would be an understatement! So please take a look at the brand new Kage Collective website (built by our very own Patrick LaRoque) and have a look at our launch stories. The site will be updated regularly and will definitely give us all a bit of pressure to go out with our Fuji X cameras and document life as we see it!

To date Adobe Software hasn't come up with reasonable raw processing for the Fuji X-trans sensor. The way the new sensor captures and processes light requires new thinking on their part and as yet Adobe has been ...

I have my X-Pro1 over a month now and I'm pretty happy with it. So satisfied that I only took out my 5D mkII once and when I did so I realized my Canon with the 50mm f1.4 lens hunts more than the Fuji does. Yes, the X-Pro1 has it quirks. Does it frustrate me? No. Although there are few things I'd like to change if I could and if you read this you probably know what I'm talking about. One of them is that there is no minimum shutter speed in auto ISO mode and an other thing which actually bothers me more is the position of the auto focus selection button, it would be great to be able to assign the Fn button to select the focus point. Anyway, hopefully Fuji listens and will address these in a future firmware update. Meanwhile here are couple of shots from the last weeks when my grandma came over to visit us and did a few trips around Dublin. Most of the photos were taken with the 18mm f2.0 lens and processed in Lightroom 4.

I recently acquired two little, vintage dinky mini cars and normally would have reached for a 50mm lens and a sub f/2.0 aperture to create a miniature world effect. The Fujinon 35mm lens at f/1.4 is equivalent to a 53mm lens at f/2.0 on a full frame camera so I began to wonder if I need to turn to 50mm to achieve the depth of field I was looking for. Starting of with the Fujifilm X-E1 & 18-55mm XF Lens”>18-55mm zoom lens I shot a number of photos of the car (setting the X-E1 on macro mode). You can see from the following two images to get the scale right meant framing at 35mm-55mm....

You can see that moving between the 18-55 zoom and 35mm prime offered different focal lengths and I could adjust the scale of the car. I think both the 18-55mm zoom and 35mm prime worked well to achieve a ‘slight’ sense of reality. I am genuinely beginning to wonder if I really need to retain a full frame camera given the quality of photographs I can achieve with the fujinon lenses. I know there is an even finer DoF offered with f/1.4 on full frame but I am just not sure how often I actually need it.

Note: All photos were captured on the Fujifilm X-E1 and either the 18-55mm zoom lens or 35mm prime lens.

I’ve been cooped up these past few days, doing all the peripheral messing around that surrounds a photography business. The stuff where you don’t get to take pictures. I get itchy when I don’t take pictures. You wouldn’t like me when I’m itchy…

So this afternoon I took a break and walked around that room in the house where we never spend any time. The one with the furnace and the mess of things we don’t use everyday but keep around for some reason. The next season, a camping trip, the kids getting married. Just in case you know? I used the X-Pro1 and an Eye-Fi Pro X2 card I got recently for a job. I needed a way to shoot tethered and this was the only way to do it. It works, although it has a tendency to seriously slow down at times and I haven’t yet figured out the reason. Shooting RAW brings it to its knees but the files do get there eventually. Today it worked like a charm: I was shooting monochrome jpegs and using Lightroom’s Auto Import watch folder — the pictures were all waiting for me, ready to be edited by the time I sat down at the iMac. Cool.....

... I have been shooting with the X-Pro1 now for around 6 months and I really do enjoy it as a camera. But when out today it kept erroring when trying to shoot a couple of short movie clips.. This isnt something i often use the camera for as, to be honest its pretty poor at video but it would be nice for it to at least work. Anyone else had this issue? As far as stills go I am really very impressed with the performance across the board. Shooting both raw and Jpeg is currently still the best option. Archiving the raw files for a time when they may out perform the Jpegs but currently Lightroom produces better images from the Pro Standard Jpegs than the RAWs. Although the latitude of the RAW does still out perform the jpeg.

This is a very good lens and should be in any self respecting Fuji X-Pro1 or X-E1 owners bag. It feels solid and is very well screwed together. I’ve had rubbish weather to test out this lens and I’m upset I cannot replicate the very bright conditions on Sunday when I first road tested the lens. Nonetheless the rubbish weather has enabled me to confirm the lens OIS works well…

Using it with the X-Pro1 OVF takes some getting used to in that the size of the frame is tiny at full zoom. That say, it is perfect for action shots as you can see what is happening around the frame. I didn’t mind using it with the OVF in that way but I preferred to use it with the EVF. The lens has a fast and (scarily) quiet auto-focus mechanism and uses an internal focusing system, which means the front element and filter thread does not rotate on focus. Focus speed is very good, much better than any of the primes except the 18mm, and I suspect the original primes will be quietly upgraded to use the linear motors used in this lens over time. However, sometime the 18-55 feels more inaccurate at focusing than the primes. This seems to be some that was addressed in firmware for the primes so I wouldn’t be too worried about it right now. The lens is very sharp and compares well with constant aperture zooms I have used. By way of comparison I think it compares favourably to the 12-35 for M43s in that it is almost as quick to focus, is ultra sharp (though the sensor helps here) and the OIS is very good. Also the 12-35 suffers badly from CA on Olympus bodies. The 18-55mm only really loses out because of its aperture – ultimately the 12-35mm is better in low light because of that. Distortion isn’t too bad and is only really noticeable for me at 18mm (note, distortion is corrected in body). There is some barreling at 18mm, but no pincushion distortion I noticed at the 55mm setting. Bokeh is very good at 55mm but is a little busy at 18mm. Vignetting is not a problem. Quibbles aside this is a very good lens and is a steal for the £529 I’ve seen it advertised for. Basically, get it as soon as you can. You won’t regret it!

Here’s a group of photos from the grand opening of DiverseWorks’ new space in Houston, Texas. DiverseWorks is a fantastic art gallery that has some of the most amazing shows in the city that are both diverse and dynamic in nature.

It’s one of the most asked questions in the reviews I’ve read. And the answers are different. And now, that the X-E1 is finally available also in the US market, is it really better to buy the X-E1 rather than the X-PRO1? Is it better to save the money, buy the X-E1, and buy an additional lens with the money you saved? Here are an autofocus comparison and four more reviews....

I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my flash off-camera on my X-Series cameras but still retain TTL function for a while now. I’ve asked around everywhere but either nobody knows, or nobody seems to agree how to get it done. Fuji don’t produce a TTL flash cable themselves, and there are no 3rd party solutions either for the Fujifilm X-Series cameras. I have a radio flash sync system, which is fine when I’m taking photos in a studio type situation where TTL metering doesn’t matter, but I wanted something to get the flash off the camera when I was out and about, an easy TTL solution that meant I didn’t have to try too hard for quick snaps. Sometimes by the time you’ve got the flash power right the moment has gone. I’ve been using the EF-20 and EFX-20 flashes with the X100 off-camera by activating the on-camera flash and firing the EFX-20 flash as a slave (the EF-20 doesn’t have a slave mode). This works well in many situations but has a few disadvantages. Firstly, you might not want the on-camera flash to fire – you may only want light from your main flash. Secondly, it’s not always 100% reliable, and finally, it doesn’t work on the X-Pro1 as it doesn’t have an on-board flash! I’ve been doing a lot of work improving my flash techniques recently (a long post will be coming up about that soon) and really wanted this sorted out so I decided to take matters into my own hands! I tried out a supposedly universal cable in-store that said it worked with Nikon, Canon and Fujifilm, but it didn’t work at all. I wondered if one of the cables from another main manufacturer would work on the X-Series cameras. The two candidates being Nikon and Canon of course. Given the historic connection Fuji had with Nikon producing the S2 and S5 DSLRs I thought that a Nikon lead would be the obvious choice, but having had a look at the two, the connection pin placements on the Canon cables seemed to match better with the pins on the Fuji hot-shoe. With the genuine Canon cables around £50 I just couldn’t justify buying one on the off-chance that it worked, but after a search around I found a 3rd party Canon compatible cable by Pixel on Amazon at £16.99 – at that price it was worth a shot! This is the cable I bought - Pixel FC311/s Compact TTL Sync Cord for Canon....

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